Being Together is Enough

This winter we have had a surprisingly little amount of snow here on the coast. I never remember a winter that we've had so little snow, but the good thing is that when there's not much snowfall then usually that means the ice is good on the ponds. The harbormaster said we could go ahead and have fun skating on his pond which is very nice. It is bigger than the one we used to skate on and you can skate from one little pond, down a little canal to a second bigger pond that's more sheltered from the winds that come across the ocean and up over the fields. What a lot of fun we've been having over there! The other day we asked Gram if she wanted to come skating with us. Gram's always ready for a good adventure, so off we went.

  Mum and Gram were great skating on the ice. They fell down the least of any of us. :-) They have had lots of practice over the years and know some fun things to do on the ice.

 Mum and Charity on the pond

Mum is such a graceful skater. She even knows how to skate backwards. We girls have attempted it too, but for some reason it doesn't come out nearly so graceful as Mum's does. :-)

Pam and Charity's fancy skating technique

Why take figure skating lessons when all you have to do is just watch some figure skating and then go out and try doing it yourself. What's the worse thing that can happen...you get yourself covered in bruises so you can hardly move the next day? Oh well, at least we had fun!

A couple weeks ago, Charity made the mistake of looking at puppies for sale online. Needless to say, this is Dixie, our newest edition to the McFarland household. She is a Great Pyrenees, Border Collie mix puppy and we all have fallen in love with her. She loves snuggling with her mommy,Charity.

All of us girls had taken some time off in early February because we were originally thinking about going to Canada to see family; however, once a puppy came on the scene we had to edit our plan. We went down to Freeport to meet April and Kyle and had a blast with them! We met them at the L.L.Bean there in Freeport which was the first time that some of us had been there so we had fun. 

They had a cute little living room area set up in L.L.Bean. They had a nice hot fire going in the fire place that we enjoyed for a little bit while we were waiting for Kyle and April to get there and meat up with us. 

The famous L.L.Bean boot (that you're not really supposed to climb on). :-) We had lots of fun together with April and Kyle and also on the drive back home again that night. Kyle was so patient with us and our lack of knowledge about the city. He kindly told us how to get out of town again and back on our way home, and we actually made it without any wrong turns! Thanks a ton, April and Kyle! We'll have to do it again sometime!

Winter Fun

 For a couple of years, we've had fun trimming some evergreens on our own land to use for Christmas trees some year. This year we cut our first one off the land and brought it home to fill the extra space in the dining room. Sometimes if they don't have that perfect full and fat shape it adds an old touch that fits our old farmhouse.

Pam having fun decorating our tree in the dining room. It was Pam's idea to use the extra space in there to put a Christmas tree, and we all loved it!

It's always fun to help Gramp and Gram decorate for Christmas! This is Great-Great Grandma's village that Pam's putting up. Gram always has done such a great job of preserving some of the great old family decorations.

We did their tree in gold with burgundy bows this year. It really looked nice. It's a good thing we had Gramp there to tell us if some of the ornaments needed to be adjusted or let us know if the tree was "leaning toward Sawyers" (don't ask me which direction that is). Gramp is always so much fun!

Christmas at Matt and Victoria's was a blast! We had their Christmas on Sunday and ours on Monday so it wasn't too hectic all in one day. I love Mrs. Wardwell's stockings she makes for the kids. She does such a great job!

This year we heard about a new place to skate over on Billy Grant's bog. He keeps it nice and cleared off to make a nice place to go skating. He said we were welcome to have fun skating over there, so we tried it out, and it is the best ice I've seen! We've been having a blast!

It was about 10 degrees that morning, so we only skated for about an hour when our toes began to feel about 10 degrees also. So we went home to warm up by the fire and talk about what to do next. We very very rarely all get a Saturday off together, so we were going to make the best of it!

So after we warmed up, we decided to head off to Hermon Mountain and  go skiing. It had been several years since we'd been skiing, so it took a little bit to get the hang of it again, but we sure did have a great time! There's nothing like the feeling of skiing toward the woods and not being sure exactly how or if you'll be able to stop. :-) Good times!

Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summertime

So much has been happening here this summer. We have been savoring all the nice warn summer days and long evenings together. We take advantage of our evenings and days off together and have really enjoyed making many fun memories this way.

We had been wanting to hike Bubble Rock for quite a while. A couple of the other girls hiked it a while ago, so of course, we had to try it too. After hiking up Sargent Mountain it didn't seem nearly so long, but we still got off onto a wrong trail. Leave it up to us!

                                The view was just amazing! Seeing things like this is so refreshing.

One evening Matt and Torrie stopped by for some firewood. They were heading down to the camp for a bonfire on the beach, and asked if anyone else wanted to come along. We had a great time roasting marshmallows. It was a beautiful sunset too! It's so quiet down there in the evenings...there's no place like it for a nice little get away.

We got Dad a honey extractor a while ago, but this was the first year we were able to try it out. Dad collected several pounds of honey from one of his hives this summer, so we had a blast extracting it out of the frames. Then we can reuse the comb and Dad can give it back to the bees so they don't have to build up the comb again. We ended up getting about four to five gallons of honey. We were very thankful!

We were so excited to find another catch in one of our traps the other day. We had to throw the female back because she had eggs, but we got to keep these two. One of them was soft shell and one was hard shell.

So the update on the lobstering is that the old saying is true...blue boats definitely DO sink. :-) It was so funny! We received two calls one day notifying us that our boat had turned over. We went down to the camp to find the bow sticking up out of the water. She was upside down with the stern sitting on the bottom of the ocean. But Dad and Matt came to the rescue and got it out with Matt's boat. Thank the Lord for the safety!! We lost some things, but the engine finally runs again, and will soon be for sale. It's very heavy for the boat, so we will have to look for a smaller outboard...maybe a 20 or 25hp.

Lost our fishing gloves and gaff, but that's okay. We are working on getting our traps in for the season using our row boat. What alot of fun! When we got in the other day, that board in the stern for the outboard ripped  up and we could see the hole where the boat was leaking. We were SO thankful for the safety because it could just as easily have ripped off when we hauled the trap up on.

Only two more traps to get in. We lost one trap because it got tangled in someone's old fishing line, but that's the way it goes. The other two traps are quite a ways out, so we'll have to see if we can get our boat in the water and drive it around to pick them up. But we'll see.

One Mooring in Maine

After getting some new fuel in the gas tank in the boat, we decided to give her another try. So Jay came over to help us, and we took her out. Dad went down to the warf with us and then drove over to the camp to get the skiff ready for us to row in when we got around.

This is our mooring that Dad helped us make. Someone else gave us the idea of how you can make your own mooring with concrete, and it has worked real well! You see there are two different sizes of chains. The large chain is the ground chain that acts as kind of like a spring as the tide comes in and goes out or as the boat moves. The small chain is the light chain that hooks onto the ball. Then we have rope from the ball to the boat.

It was a little bit rough the evening we took it out to moor it in the reach, so there was a lot of sea spray in our faces, but it felt great!! Pam drove us around, and Jay went with us of course in case we had engine failure.

Our tags came! Yay! We get to have five traps, and you have to get new tags every year.

Getting the buoys tide onto the end of the ropes. We couldn't wait to get them out! 

Just for the record....do not use this bait that we decided to try!! :-) Bait was kind of hard to come by at the time, so we decided to try sardines. Not a good idea! The lobsters didn't think it was a good idea either, I guess...(See my nifty little knife? It comes in real handy if you need to cut rope or get the bait apart or anything like that.)

All ready to go! I know that pink isn't the most popular color for buoys, but our friends that also go lobstering told us you want big and bright when it comes to choosing your buoys or else the sail boats will run them over. So we got big and bright! (Besides, I don't think other fishermen would want to be seen hauling up traps with pink buoys on them, so probably they won't steel them.) :-)

Just a little water to bail. Gramp says it's bad luck to have a blue boat because blue boats always sink, but he said as long as it's not light blue your all set, so hopefully we are all set. It's a good thing someone painted over the light blue.

We drove in to load the traps onto the boat. It was great because we were able to fit all five traps on this boat. Last year we had to just do one or two at the most because that's all the little boat could handle.

Maiden Voyage

Well, our new impeller unit finally arrrived! A neighbor down the road works at the boat house over in Brooklin, and he was a big help to us...lending us his muffs to try out the outboard without filling a big tub of water. We eventually got our own because it was so nifty! He also gave us some oil for it. Anyway, Dad let me help put on the new impeller and we were ready to try it out. So we hooked up the hose to the muffs and it was definitely cycling the water through better. We were so thankful! Now it was time to take it out down to the town landing. So one of us called Matt and he came down to help us launch it.

We got it out and for some reason it was sputtering and not turning over. We didn't know what was wrong with it, so meanwhile we started drifting out into the harbor. Thankfully, Dad had given us some wise instructions to take oars with us in the boat...just in case. So we were able to start paddling back. The whole thing was so hilarious! When we got back Jay seemed quite confident he could get it going, so he peeled off his boots and socks and jumped on with us.

We still sputtered a little bit, and a friendly fisherman asked us if we needed an oar or needed help getting back in, but it wasn't long before the engine turned over Jay got it going.

We had taken off the cap to try to find out what could be wrong with it. It looked so redneck! We had a great time!

                                                           Big brothers are the best!

We got out in the harbor and were having so much fun that we forgot that the tide was slowly coming in on Jason's boots. When we were coming in near the land we noticed Matt was pointing to something. We were confused at first until we saw a boot floating on top of the water just a little ways from shore.

Most people use their gaff for lobstering...we use it for rescuing our shoes from floating out to sea. hahaha

Jay told us we needed new gas, because we still had the old stuff in it. So we got some new gas in it and she ran way better! We'll share some pictures of putting out our mooring in the next post.

4th of July Weekend

Our 4th of July weekend couldn't have been better. First of all, Charity and I decided that we were going to spend Friday night down at the camp. We had a thunderstorm that night, but when you plan to sleep down at the camp you never go down with the goal of being able to actually catch up on sleep. You go down with the goal of having fun and sleep goes on the back burner.

The next morning started with fog then cleared off to be a beautiful day. We always enjoy mornings at the camp, watching the sun come out and wake everything up.

Sunday night April, Pam, Charity, and I decided to have a sleep over at Gramp and Gram's. We had a great time staying up late, laughing and talking as always. "We didn't get much sleep, but we had alot of fun."

 This is the view from Gramp and Gram's back deck on the morning of the 4th. When we were little, Gramp used to tell us Clem the Clam stories. They always started the same way, "It was the most beautiful day you ever saw in all your life." Well, we definitely had a Clem the Clam morning that morning. It was gorgeous! 

                            It makes for a great place to have your devotions in the morning...sitting out on the back deck on the porch swing.

                                     Mum is always happy when she has a baby in her arms! Lots of fun!

I took this picture after we got back from water tubing out on Patten Pond. Matt got a boat earlier this year, and he got a tube so he could pull us out on the pond. It was our first experience water tubing, and we all fell off the first time, but before we left the pond we all managed to be able to have a ride without falling off. The water was really warm compared to the ocean water down at the camp. What a blast it was! Can't wait to do it again! Thanks a ton, Matt!

Pam, Charity, and I stopped for some ice cream at the store, then headed down to Stonington to watch fireworks. This is a quick picture of the sunset from the Deer Isle bridge.

You can't see this picture very well, but I had to put it in just because it was so funny. How do you expect to be able to watch the fireworks when the pier is so crowded with people? That's what your boat is for. All you have to do is get a five gallon bucket, walk up on your boat, climb up on top of the cabin, turn the bucket upside down and sit down to watch the fireworks there. I think he had a great idea!

Time to go to town meeting. They wanted to make some changes to the town dock and help accommodate some of the commercial fishermen, so we had a town meeting Thursday night to discuss it and vote on it. We voted on one other thing too, but overall, it was pretty short and to the point. We had a good turnout for it, though.